


us alive, right here, feeling lucky

by thatdamneddame



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon, F/M, Family, Gen, Meet the Family, Post Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 11:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jazmine calls, after six years. "The war's over," she says. "Come home."</p>
            </blockquote>





	us alive, right here, feeling lucky

**Author's Note:**

> So I read the Pacific Rim novel and instantly wanted fluffy, domestic au fic where a besotted Raleigh takes Mako home for Thanksgiving and they hang out with Jazmine and Yancy Becket. This is not that fic.
> 
> Anyways, Jazmine is mentioned, briefly, in the novel as Raleigh's sister, but you don't need to have read the novel to understand anything about this fic. Promise.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to prettyasadiagram for the beta and also for sending me a list of pretentious poetry like a champ. Title comes from one of her selections, "The Conditional" by Ada Limón.

Jazmine calls, after six years. "The war's over," she says. "Come home."

The word “home” rolls around Raleigh's brain looking for meaning. He thinks about flight suits, the smell of metal, hissing gears. He thinks about blood in his mouth and how there was Yancy and then there was nothing but all this space in his head, in his life where Yancy was supposed to be. He thinks of Mako's laugh, fleeting, uncommon, like a hummingbird in spring—something to hold on to. Something to look forward to.

Home. That seems as good a definition as any.

 

***

 

She does not need to be asked twice. In fact, Mako doesn’t even need to be asked at all.

“My sister called,” Raleigh says, spoon halfway to his mouth. It’s the first time he’s spoken about her in years, first time he’s mentioned her to anyone, but Mako already knows that.

“I’ll come with you,” she tells him, answering a question Raleigh’s not quite sure how to ask. Mako can see Raleigh’s shoulders relax, but more than that, she can _feel_ his relief like it’s her own

 _Drift hangover_ they call it. _Drift compatible_ they say. Mako’s not quite sure there are any words in English or Japanese to explain what she feels when Raleigh smiles at her, happy just to be near.

 

***

 

“We’ll be back,” they tell Herc, who has nothing left but the program he gave his life to, the one that saved the whole world but not his family, not the people he loved the most. Raleigh knows what that feels like, the yawning emptiness as vast as an ocean, or the open sky above. Mako does too, now, from Raleigh and the drift. From Kaiju taking from her what is not theirs and leaving nothing behind but a red shoe.

Raleigh and Mako have never drifted with Herc—never will with the closing of the Breach and PPDC and the last of the Shatterdomes—but they do not need the Drift to know that they are all they have now. To know that they are the last of their kind.

“Take your time,” Herc says. His voice echoes in the empty halls of the Shatterdome, soon to be dismantled. When you’ve given it all, the hardest part, Raleigh knows, is figuring out what’s actually left in the end. “It’s family.” Herc adds, and Raleigh doesn’t even know what _family_ means any more, but he knows what he needs to do.

 

***

 

Mako and Raleigh hold hands across the Pacific. If they close their eyes they can almost imagine that they’re in a Jaeger. Almost, but not quite. Mako scratches her nose and Raleigh tugs at the cuff of his sweater and these sensations are individual, mundane, unshared between them except in the echoes of the Drift. Together they fly across the Pacific in an airplane, a machine with no heart.

It hurts, they both think independently and together, more than it should , this disconnect between man and machine.

 

***

 

Mako peers around, takes in the tiny airport and the parents yelling at their kids and the pine trees out the windows. “Does it feel good to be home?” she asks, even though she already knows.

Raleigh pulls their bags from the luggage carousel and shrugs. “I haven’t been back in years. Not since I left, really.” He doesn’t say, _you’re my home now_. Mako knows that too.

“Neither have I,” she admits and tucks her hand, so small, into his.

 

***

 

There is a media circus, so they’ve been told. Herc doesn’t have the patience for it. “Keep your heads down,” he’d growled before they left. “They’re not going to stay away forever.”

In Alaska, on the news, there is a picture of them floating in the Pacific, bodies curled towards each other, foreheads touching as if in silent prayer. Raleigh has been through this before; he knows that next will come their PPDC ID photos. Yearbook pictures. Interviews with childhood friends. They won’t be anonymous forever. They won’t be anonymous ever again.

Mako tucks her blue hair behind her ears when she picks up the key for their rental car. Tokyo’s Daughter understands this game as well, although Raleigh knows Pentecost was a far more effective barrier against the world and its prying eyes than Herc could ever hope to be. “Do you think they will find us here?” she asks.

Raleigh once tried to disappear on the Wall and Pentecost still found him. Raleigh once tried to disappear in himself and Mako pulled him back. Nothing is forever.

“Not for a while,” he tells her. He will always give Mako the truth.

 

***

 

Driving through the Alaskan countryside feels like a dream long forgotten. Mako has been here before, in Raleigh’s memories. Has scaled its mountains and built its Wall. She’s had her heart broken and she’s fallen in love. She remembers it in pieces, scattered, an imprint of emotion here and there, but they are not her stories. Raleigh has not given them to her yet. Mako, though, she wants to learn. Wants to hear Raleigh tell her himself so that she can tuck those words away, next to her heart, where she keeps everything dear to her.

Mako winds down the window and feels the fresh air on her face, her hair blowing in the wind. From the driver’s seat Raleigh laughs. “You look like a wild woman,” he tells her, smiling.

Mako grins back, helpless. Hopeful.

 

***

 

Jazmine still lives in the same town where they grew up. At fifteen, Raleigh thought he’d bust out of high school and travel the world. At fifteen, Raleigh had figured he’d probably end up like all the other underachievers after high school, living with their parents and waiting for life to happen. But Jazmine, man, she was supposed to go places.

Kaiju, though, no one had been expecting that.

 

***

 

It’s dark when they make it to Jazmine’s, house and street dark like everyone else is already asleep.

“Shhh,” she tells them, coming outside on silent feet, closing the front door behind her. “The baby’s sleeping.” And the word _baby_ gets stuck in Raleigh’s head. Baby. His little sister has a baby. But Jazmine’s wrapping him up in a fierce hug before he can ask.

Raleigh had wondered—late at night, body worn out from pushups but still unable to sleep—if Jazmine would smell like home and family and everything else Raleigh left behind when he was sixteen. She doesn’t. Jazmine smells like pine and soap and brown sugar.

He hugs her back and wonders if his sister should feel like a stranger to him, in his arms. Raleigh knows the Kaiju changed a lot of things.

 

***

 

Jazmine’s house is big, but it’s close to shore, cheap land because beachfront property lost its allure sometime between the first and second attack, when it became clear that Kaiju were not a fluke.

“It’s not always easy to make it to a public bunker in time,” she tells them, nodding to the steel reinforced door leading down to the basement. Raleigh and Mako say nothing. There are no charming anecdotes to tell about how they beat in the head of a Kaiju with an oil tanker and it still came back for more. Even Newt knows that steel and hope are not, _were_ not, enough to keep Kaiju away, not if they wanted in.

Instead of Kaiju, they make small talk about their travels. About the weather. Jazmine makes them tea and tells Raleigh honestly, “I’m glad you’re here.”

(It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Jazmine looks at Mako and sees a hole where Yancy ought to be.)

 

***

 

There’s only one bed in the guest room. Jazmine asks if she needs to make up the couch and they both tell her not to worry about it.

Mako and Raleigh, they’re not sleeping together, not properly. Not yet. They share a bed and they share dreams and—there are stories of Jaegers moving in their sleep, matching the movements of their pilots even still. Gipsy Danger is dead and some days it feels like Raleigh lost another brother. But Raleigh knows that his future is in Mako now, and even when things are bad, when his muscles ache with phantom pains from another life, that is more than enough.

Raleigh moves in his sleep and Mako moves with him, now. Mako dreams of swords and shoes and snow and Raleigh dreams the same. Gipsy Danger is dead, and Raleigh can’t even imagine a world without Mako in it, as important to him as his own heart. Unable to breathe without her, his lungs. In bed, she tucks her head under his chin, presses her feet—small and cold—against his calf, and Raleigh knows she feels the same.

 

***

 

It’s silent when Mako wakes up, not quite dawn, only one or two stray birds beginning to sing. She’s never done well with changing time zones.

On the kitchen counter sits a bowl of candy, bright colored wrappers standing out against white porcelain. The coffee pot starts brewing on a timer, beeping softly as it switches on, but everyone else in the house stays asleep. Out the window Mako can see a suburban street, like in every movie she has never actually seen except for inside Raleigh’s head. There aren’t any pictures on the walls and Mako finds herself missing Raleigh’s bunk—covered in pictures of people and places he hold dear—so bitterly that it almost hurts. It is important, Mako thinks, to remember.

She pours herself a glass of water. Drinks it. Puts the empty glass by the sink. Outside the windows, Mako can see unfamiliar trees and an unfamiliar skyline and thinks that this is not the Alaska that either of them remember.

 

***

 

He wakes when she crawls back into bed, mind switching from _asleep_ to _awake_ as easily as ever.

“It’s not home, is it?” she asks, voice soft, even though she already knows the answer.

Raleigh knows what ghost drifting is, knows all about drift hangovers and memories that aren’t yours that never quite leave. He can still remember his parents bringing home his little baby brother and he has to shake his head to remind himself that the only one with a baby brother in the Becket family is Yancy, and Yancy is dead.

So Raleigh knows that he’s never listened to Shibuya pop before Mako, even if he does know all the words to “Dream Fighter,” but he also knows that this—this connection between him and Mako—it’s something more. Never before in Raleigh’s life has he seen a girl holding an umbrella in the rain and thought _yes_. Raleigh has met and kissed and loved pretty girls all over the world, but he has never taken a look at a person and wanted to give everything he has, wanted to take anything she was willing to give. Never with Yancy did Raleigh think that he knew everything his Drift partner was thinking, but still wanted to hear them say it anyways.

Mako asks a question she already knows the answer to, but it doesn’t take the Drift for Raleigh to hear everything she isn’t saying. “No,” he tells her. “It hasn’t been for a while.”

Mako doesn’t say _we don’t have to stay_. They both know that there is nothing you wouldn’t do for family, no matter how much it hurts.

 

***

 

The last time Raleigh saw her, Jazmine had said, “Look at my brother all grown up,” and she had hugged him, tears in her eyes.

The last time, Jazmine had said, “How’s Jaegers? Saving any lives?” because every other Becket was dead and Kaiju were still coming and they had to get a court order to keep the press away from Yancy’s funeral.

There was nothing to say, so Raleigh stayed silent. There was no way for him to explain to her that he wasn’t sleeping and he wasn’t eating. That Jazmine was there looking like their mother, looking like their brother, and his only comfort was the thought _we made that call together_. That’s the thing about Jaegers—you pilot them together. The last time Raleigh was in Anchorage, he only had survivor’s guilt and a sister who wouldn’t meet his eye and no words to explain to her how it felt like half of him was missing.

Now though, Jazmine has a baby named William and a dead boyfriend named Bruno. Loss is not a thing limited to Rangers and people who couldn’t run away fast enough. Everyone talks about Kaiju like they were the whole problem, but Raleigh was fifteen when they first attacked. He was old enough to know that the world was going to shit, even then.

 

***

 

“He was working on the Wall,” Jazmine says, scraping eggs onto Mako and Raleigh’s plates.

Raleigh lost his brother and his mother. Mako’s lost every parents she’s ever known. There is nothing for them to say that Jazmine doesn’t already know.

Even still, Raleigh thinks that the death of Yancy will always hang between them.

 

***

 

(The only pictures in Jazmine’s house are of the dead and Raleigh thinks that Jazmine might have stopped planning for the future back when he did.)

 

***

 

They go into the city. Around them, there are children and families and couples, people laughing and happy.

Raleigh overhears snippets of conversations, catches a glimpse of televisions and newspaper headlines. They’re all talking about the Breach. The Wall was supposed to be the final solution—humans caging themselves in to keep the monsters out. No one knows what to do with themselves now. No one knows what comes next. Everyone titters with possibility.

Raleigh doesn’t know what comes next either. For the first time, it doesn’t scare him.

 

***

 

“We’ll go to the park,” Jazmine says, passing another newspaper stand, Raleigh and Mako in silhouette on the cover, shifting the baby on her hip. “It’ll be quiet there.”

Raleigh was in Lima during the height of the Becket Boy craze, so there’s no way Jazmine, way back in Anchorage, could know exactly what it was like—the phone calls and interviews and girls, overwhelming at times. But Jazmine was still his sister and Jazmine still had a TV and, Raleigh realizes, she must have watched every single one of his interviews, desperate for news, because he and Yancy were terrible at remembering to call. The thing about drifting is that you sometimes forget that there’s a world outside of its silence. The thing about drifting with your brother is that you sometimes forget you left your sister at home.

“You’re not going to cry if we start playing monkey in the middle are you?” Raleigh asks, remembering somewhere deep in his bones how this brother thing works.

“Don’t tell Mako lies about me,” Jazmine scolds, smiling for the first time since Raleigh’s come back. And Mako, standing next to Raleigh but not quite touching him, already remembers Raleigh’s childhood, has seen it herself, but he still wants to give it to her. Wants to give her the words that she can hold next to her heart. Wants her to know his sister and see his old school so she can love them too, like Raleigh always has.

So when Raleigh grins, “Never,” it’s not a lie. Not even a little bit.

 

***

 

Mako’s been to Anchorage before, but it was years ago when piloting was just a goal, a means to an end. What she remembers is the Marshall teaching her the Jaeger Bushido moves he codified himself. She remembers seeing the heart of a Jaeger for the first time, and Gottlieb telling her that numbers held the answer, and Geiszler scoffing, up to the elbows in the entrails of a monster that destroyed her family. Anchorage was steel and sweat and revenge burning through her veins, just like every city was after Onibab. Just like every city before Raleigh.

“It’s beautiful,” she tells him now. The park is quiet, with most people at work or school, but there are a few kids playing hooky and mothers taking their babies for a stroll.

From here, mountains guard the city like sentinels. The ocean laps at the shore, untouched. Her hair shines in the Alaskan sun, the tips the last trace of Kaiju Blue they will ever see. From here you can’t see the Wall, a reminder of what almost was. From here it looks exactly like Raleigh remembers, except that Mako can feel the ache in her chest from where Yancy used to be—a phantom pain she understands with the Marshal’s death.

Raleigh smiles at her, bright as the sun, and she can feel it in her bones— _love, want, trust_. She can feel it with the beating of her heart. These are things made stronger by the Drift, but not created by it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he tells her.

She takes his hand, large and warm, into her own. “Me too.”

 

***

 

Laying on the grass, Mako dozing with her head cradled in Raleigh’s lap, Jazmine asks, “Has it changed much?”

Raleigh shrugs, careful not to disturb Mako, who hates waking up even though she is a much lighter sleeper than Raleigh. “I don’t know. I was just a kid last time I was here.” He hadn’t thought it at the time, but no one ever thinks that they’re a kid when they head off to war.

“You’ve been back, though,” she presses, “when you worked on the Wall.”

“It wasn’t the same.” Working the Wall was unlike anything Raleigh had ever done, will ever do. He’s been a soldier, knows what it’s like to fight for survival, but everywhere else Raleigh’s been, he’s always had someone at his back. The Wall was dangerous and it was isolating and it was exactly what Raleigh had needed at the time, when every time he closed his eyes he could feel his brother die. It wasn’t that Raleigh had wanted to get lost in himself and his guilt and his pain, it was that he wanted to get outside of himself. Don’t sleep so you don’t remember. Work hard so you feel the ache in your bones and not that phantom pain in your arm, in your heart.

But the Kaiju are gone now; Raleigh and Mako did that. And Mako is sleeping in the sun. And the sky is blue and Jazmine has a baby and the future that Raleigh couldn’t imagine is coming, is here, and it’s really not so bad.

“It’s better this time,” he tells her, because there is no way for Raleigh to express the enormity of love and hope that is in his heart without aide of the Drift. “Your cooking’s improved, for one.”

And Jazmine laughs, head thrown back and carefree, just like she used to do when she was little and watching _A.N.T. Farm_ before their parents got home, waking the baby and waking Mako and not giving one good goddamn _._

 

***

 

Jazmine lies and says she has to run a few errands, leaving Raleigh and Mako alone in the place that he grew up.

He takes her to his favorite bookstore and where he always used to get ice cream on hot summer days. He shows her where he went to school and where he used to go when he cut class. They stand at the edge of the ocean and look out into the blue and neither of them speaks because there is nothing for them to say.

They saved that. They did that. Raleigh and Mako and Mako and Raleigh and there is no way that the Drift or drift hangover explains the way that Raleigh feels about her. There is no way it explains the way Mako feels about him.

They eat ice cream even though it’s still too cold out and let the water lap against their feet, marveling at how water feels on their own skin and not against the metal cage of a machine.

 

***

 

Raleigh makes dinner that night and Mako says, “I didn’t know you could cook,” and Jazmine laughs, “That’s because he can’t.” But, as it turns out, Raleigh’s the best chef of the bunch, not that it matters when Jazmine cracks a bottle of wine she’s been saving for years.

For a while there it feels a lot like what the world could have been if the Kaiju had never come. Raleigh and Mako and Jazmine eating and drinking and telling embarrassing childhood stories. No one thinks about tomorrow and no one thinks about the dead and they are all just happy—so, so happy—to be alive.

 

***

 

At night, Mako curls against Raleigh. “You’re finally happy,” she whispers into his neck, “to be back in Alaska.”

“It’s starting to feel more like I remember it,” he tells her, remembering being a punkass teenager here before the Ranger program made him better and worse.

Mako hums against him, her hair tickling his nose, her hands warm on his chest and her feet cold on his legs. “I like it here. It’s better than I remember it.”

Raleigh puts his arm around her shoulders, narrow but strong, and pulls her close. If they can’t have the Drift they can at least have this. “That’s because you didn’t get the Raleigh Becket tour,” he assures her, making Mako laugh. And when Mako kisses him, Raleigh can feel the smile on her lips. Can feel himself smile, helpless and automatic, in response.

 

***

 

“You love her, don’t you,” Jazmine says over breakfast, not really a question, Mako still fast asleep upstairs.

“Yeah,” Raleigh tells her, not embarrassed by it in the slightest. This morning he watched Mako sleep, tried to memorize the way her hair fell across her face, the pink of her lips in the morning light, how her hands had curled against the sheets when he woke up, like she was offended that Raleigh would even consider being awake at this hour. Raleigh has loved Mako from the second he first saw her, feels sappy shit like how he’s probably always loved her even when he didn’t understand the possibility of her.

There’s nothing weak about loving Mako, Raleigh knows. Together they’re a team and together they killed Kaiju and Mako is the smartest, strongest person Raleigh has ever known. Even if Yancy had been alive, Raleigh thinks he would have raised mountains just on the possibility of Mako, on the possibility of piloting with her.

And when Jazmine asks, “What about Yancy?” the only reason Raleigh doesn’t react, doesn’t act out like he would have for any of the guys up on the Wall or goddamn Chuck Hansen, is because Jazmine is his sister. Because Knifehead took someone from both of them that day.

“He would have understood,” Raleigh says, because he is sure of that. He didn’t think that he could ever have someone in his head again after his brother, but Raleigh never had any doubts about Mako. You pilot a Jaeger long enough, you go into the Drift enough, and you start to understand how it connects people. You shake someone’s hand and you know, you _know_ , down to your core, deep in your bones, what drifting with that person would be like.

Yancy had been a challenge, a thrill, a youthful revolt. Mako was steel and she was freedom and Raleigh had never felt so right about anything in his whole life, not even when he signed his life away to the Rangers.

“I didn’t think I could do it,” Raleigh explains because Jazmine is his sister and he’s trying here, “but Mako was different.”

There is a small smile on Jazmine’s face like she’s just beginning to realize that Mako Mori is something more than the Beckets could have ever dreamed, growing up in Anchorage. “You did good,” Jazmine tells him. “I like her.”

But there’s a full-blown smile on his sister’s face now, and when Raleigh grins at her, helpless as always to good cheer, she bursts out laughing. “You are such a dork.”

Mako is asleep upstairs and the Breach is closed and Raleigh lost his brother five years ago, but today he rediscovered his sister. Raleigh’s always had terrible timing, but he thinks that he has nothing but time now. Nothing but possibility and family and love.

For the first time, Raleigh feels like he’s finally won.


End file.
